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Created: November 7, 2002
Latest Update: November 7, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

WAR KILLS

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, November 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

No time for anything ancy this morning. I needed to share with you this message from Richard Koneigsberg on Great Thinkers.

On Tuesday, November 5, I picked up this message from Dr.Koenigsberg:

Subject: War as the Sacrifice of Sons

I reproduce below a poem about World War I that was sent to me by the psychological anthropologist, Howard Stein

What does Lacan have to say about this "other side" of the Law of the Father, its manifestation as vindicativeness, violence and and destructiveness? Can his theory explain these fundamental constituents of human culture and history?

What is going on here? What is this strange phenomenon called war? On the one hand, we have the attachment and submissiveness of the sons, who die and kill in the name of leaders and the causes they put forth. Ruth Stein has illuminated this brilliantly by demonstrating that acts of terrorism were undertaken in a spirit of love, equivalent to a profoundly masochistic attachment to god (the father).

Now (based on the poem that appears below), we see the other side of the coin: the brutal willingness of the fathers to assent to the slaughter of the sons (we hesitate to call this "sadism" because we still want to believe that our leaders or fathers love us).

Movies such as PATHS OF GLORY, which show soldiers being forced to get out of trenches and run into machine gun fire, make abundantly clear what was going on. Still, we wish to hold on to our conventional perception of war and believe that the GENERALS WERE ASPIRING TO VICTORY, that death and body mutilation were only a "by product" (collateral damage) of the effort to "win."

However, what if the fundamental meaning of World War I was its function as a gigantic SACRIFICIAL RITUAL (a kind of monumental potlatch)? What if the essential purpose of this war was to glorify or valorize those omnipotent objects that we wish to believe exist--gods that we call France, Germany, Russia and America.

Are we able to put our minds around this reality? Are we able to look at the profound psychopathology that lies at the core of Twentieth Century?

Historians write about these things, record the events, but they don't actually understand what brought them into being.

Those with a knowledge of depth psychology must begin to get out of their shells and to encounter the manner in which unconscious phantasies are PLAYED OUT ON THE STAGE OF SOCIAL REALITY.

The work has only just begun. It's not like anyone really knows anything. People only pretend or imagine that they know something because the STRANGE AND BIZARRE AND EXTRAORDINARY HAS BEEN ACCEPTED AS THE REAL. We desperately cling to a delusion of rationality (perhaps the Holocaust had an "economic" motivation--to extract the gold from Jewish teeth).

We must begin to bracket or make problematic that which we have tended to view as the essence of "human history."

R. K.

The Poem: Wilfred Owen: '"The Parable of the Old Man and the Young."

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one. (. 42)

Howard Stein

Richard Koenigsberg, Ph. D
Director, Library of Social Science

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